Olivia Hebert
·4 min read
A woman has revealed she wants to divorce her husband after finding out the child they had with a surrogate isn’t biologically hers.
In a post shared to the Am I the A**hole forum on Reddit, the 36-year-old woman explained that she and her husband had been married seven years and had difficulty getting pregnant. They had tried for four years before eventually going with a surrogate.
“We had what I thought was my child by surrogate over two years ago because after four years of trying to conceive with no success despite medical interventions, it turns out I am unable to carry a child to term,” she wrote. “I had always wanted to be a mom. Devastated is an understatement regarding how I felt when I found out I have a medical condition that would make it nearly impossible to carry a baby to term.”
She ultimately had to have major surgery to remove uterine growths if she had any hope of increasing fertility opportunities. However, complications during the surgery unfortunately led her surgeons to conduct a partial hysterectomy. Although they removed her uterus, her ovaries were still intact, leading her and her husband to begin looking into surrogate costs.
“My close friend since college who’d already had two kids of her own offered to serve as the surrogate for us to cut down on costs. After two disappointing IVF sessions that did not result in pregnancy, she became pregnant on the third try and carried a boy to term for us,” she explained.
After her friend gave birth, she noted a few red flags that she didn’t think much of but were glaring in hindsight. She was more concerned with her role as the primary breadwinner, working not only a full-time job but two part-time jobs to cover the bills as well as the medical and legal costs of having a surrogate.
“My friend and my husband started talking more and I would sometimes come home from my weekend job to find her already hanging out at our house when my husband was there,” she recalled. “I chalked it up as innocuous and it’s good for her to know my husband better since she was in the process of hopefully carrying our child for us.”
She added: “I also thought it weird that our son has brown eyes when both of us have blue. Then I found out that while this is uncommon, it’s possible sometimes due to many genes controlling eye color.”
However, all these red flags came to a head at a recent doctor’s appointment, in which doctors conducted a metabolic panel and blood tests that revealed their son had a blood type biologically impossible to have if the woman was his mother. Although initially she thought it was the clinic’s fault, after she got the DNA results showing the same result that she was not their child’s biological mother, her husband confessed to sexual relations with her friend, their surrogate, on a few different occasions. He claimed that he didn’t believe a pregnancy could result from their trysts because he “pulled out” and assumed he was partially to blame for their infertility issue.
“Livid and absolutely broken at the same time doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel!” she admitted. “I felt an immediate triple betrayal: from what was supposed to be my husband, my friend, and now knowing my child isn’t even really mine.”
She has since cut off her friend and sought the advice of a divorce lawyer on how to give up her legal rights to the child so that not only does not have to owe child support to her husband, but she doesn’t have to face a daily reminder of her husband and friend’s betrayal. According to the woman, both of them called her “immature” for wanting to cede her parental rights, and her parents told her that while she’s right to give up on her marriage, they don’t think she should give up on her son despite him not being biologically hers.
In the comment section, viewers sided with the woman, saying she was in the right.
“He cheated... it’s not yours,” one wrote
“You’ve suffered a terrible betrayal,” another added. “I wouldn’t be able to look at the child without being hit with the betrayal again and again. Your parents and friends don’t have to actually deal with the situation. They don’t get a vote.”
